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Thank you for checking out my classroom website. Below is my classroom blog, where I include pictures of student work and instructional videos. Above I have links to our student Artsonia gallery, Youtube channel and my Prezis. If you have any questions, leave me a comment and I'll respond as quickly as possible.

We were working on the learning objective: identify and use different line types and categorize shapes as large and small. We looked at the circle head template and discussed the size of the circles.

Kindergarten then opened the Brushes app and imported the circle head template. I then showed the class how to change the color and line size. Then drew large and small circles for the eyes of our owls. We then used a variety of line types to create our bird and add some texture.

For this piece we took our Torn Paper Value Seascape collage and photographed it. I then took a photograph of each 4th Grader in a blow up boat our after-school care program was kind enough to lend me. I couldn't find a user friendly, free "photo-shop like" app to erase the background of our photos so we used the drawing app Brushes.

We first downloaded the seascape photo into the app. Then downloaded our boat photo and sized it making sure to place it in correct proportion. (Large boat photo goes upfront in the foreground and small boat photos go in the background.)

The final step was to erase the background around our boat photo and upload our piece to Dropbox, so I could put them on Artsonia.com. Some students chose to use the drawing tool to add additional details like shark fins. This was a quick one day lesson that the kids really enjoyed.

Our learning objective for this project is I can identify and demonstrate realistic scale. We picked a comic cell from the local paper and used a 1" view finder to pick 1" of the comic to enlarge to a 12" paper. We folded our paper into four equal squares to help focus on enlarging our comic using correct proportions. We used pencil, outlined in black permanent marker and colored with marker.

This is my first animation lesson on the iPads using the DoInk app. I chose Second grade for this lesson idea. I first read the story, "I'm the Best Artist in the Ocean" by Kevin Sherry. We then used the DoInk app to draw and animate a blue squid. We drew two cells or layers slightly changing our second squid. We then flood filled a background with one color.

The final step was to put our squid in front of the background and create path for the squid to move across the screen. We then downloaded our piece to the photo gallery and then moved it to our Dropbox folder so I could put them on the web. Below is one of my student's animation piece. More can be viewed at the YouTube link below.

Denise Jackson

Check out my YouTube I've been teaching elementary Art for 18 years the last eight at Becky-David in the Francis Howell School District. Teaching Art is a great job and I absolutely love it! My job is made easier by all the wonderful Art teachers out there who share their ideas and "secrets" with me personally and through the internet. Thank you! Check out & subscribe to my Youtube channel of instructional videos & book read alouds by pressing the button at the top right.